Flexible, Open and Social Learning

Unlocking opportunities, Image by Nathalie Sheridan made available under CC BY-NC

Hello everybody,

We are very excited! Day 1 has almost arrived. We hope you will find this journey as exciting as we do and useful so that we can learn together about Flexible, Open and Social Learning and consider creative changes to our practices where we spot opportunities to enhance the student experience.

We felt that offering FOS now during the pandemic may be useful to bring us together and help and learn with and from each other in readiness for the next academic year.

FOS is a collaborative event building upon and mixing up existing OER (see Creative Commons attribution and about page) that foster inquiry-based learning. Each day will be a new opportunity for experimentation. Our daily thematic suggestions are:

Digital literacies
Flexible pedagogies
Supporting learning
Communities and collaboration
Open education

You will be invited to use the learning triggers shared in 3 alternative formats as a starting point for your learning and exploration. The related activities are also there for you to consider. Facilitators will support you throughout the 10 days.

This programme is experimental in nature, based on active inquiry-based learning and teaching approaches. We use a range of freely available tools, any of which you could easily use too. There are a variety of learning scenarios and activities to engage in and feel free to dip in and out. The hope is that you will experience something that will help you reflect on specific aspects of your own current practice, the approaches and tactics you use and perhaps also consider alternative approaches for the future, in readiness for the next academic year during these challenging times.

The first 3 days (Friday to Sunday) are all about orientation and socialisation, and we do hope that you can join us for our opening “Concert” on Friday 5th June at 1500hrs (UK time).

Stay safe!

The #FOS201 team

Dear colleagues and friends,

A warm welcome to FOS, the open cross-institutional course for professionals in Higher Education and Further Education who teach or support learning and students who are interested in learning with others from around the world about flexible, open and social learning together. The areas we would like to explore together are:

Digital literacies
Flexible pedagogies
Supporting learning
Communities and collaboration
Open education

The first three days will have a focus on getting to know each other and find out a little bit more about the course. And we are preparing a surprise for our very first day, the 5th. Watch this space. Then on Monday – Friday we will focus on the above areas of interest. The following weekend will be an opportunity to consolidate what we have learnt and see what we would like to take forward and how.

In #FOS201 you will

be supported by distributed volunteer facilitators
have the opportunity to engage in inquiry-based activities
select what you would like to do, how, when (and with whom)
and if you wish, be part of a community to learn with and from each other…
and of course, experiment with and experience new approaches and consider some of these for your own practice.

You can do as much or as little as you wish in any order. You may even just focus on one of the above for the main part of the course. Whatever is useful for you.

This brand new iteration will be offered over 10 days. We start on Friday the 5th of June and will finish the facilitated version on Sunday the 14th of June. But learning, of course, can continue.

This iteration is an open cross-institutional collaboration with volunteer facilitators from institutions across the North West of England. Together, we will support you and each other in debating and experimenting with alternative approaches to learning. We hope this will help us all to re- and un-think our practices to solve the issues we currently face in flexible, creative and collaborative ways.

Collaboration and cooperation are more important than ever. We hope you will embrace this development opportunity and join us. Everybody is welcome. Staff teaching or supporting learning at a higher education institution and students in the NW, anywhere else in the UK or further afield. Colleagues and students from the wider education sector may also find this useful. You are all welcome. The more diverse our learning community becomes the better!

FOS is an openly licensed course developed through recycling and building on existing OER course and particularly FDOL developed by Chrissi Nerantzi and Lars Uhlin (see full attribution on the right-hand side). We are using an inquiry-based approach that can work for individual and collaborative learning, online and offline.

If you work at MMU, you will also be able to use your FOS work towards up to 30 FLEX credits at Postgraduate Level of the PgCert in LTHE or HE but also the MA in HE. Get in touch if you would like to find out more regarding this. Other institutions may offer similar opportunities through their internal staff development programmes.

The FOS community space where our discussions will take place are within Advance HE Connect. We are grateful to Advance HE for their support. Please note, you will need to set-up or use your Advance HE Connect account to join this space.

We hope you will join us in this exciting 10-day adventure, to share experiences, ideas, participate in (some of) the activities and learn with and from each other. You will have the opportunity to meet like- and other-minded individuals who all care about learning and teaching and will bring diverse ideas to our conversations. Be open to new possibilities, learning explorations and experimentations. Challenge, be challenged and have fun too!

We will share regular course updates here and on Twitter @fos4l and the course hashtag is #FOS201.

We are really looking forward to learning together and will be back again nearer the start of the course. If you are joining us, please note that there is no registration and you can fully participate by just jumping in. We would love you to say hello, however on pur FOS201 padlet below.

And if you would like to complete our very short survey so that we can find out a little bit about you that would be wonderful too. You can find this in the above padlet or directly by clicking here.

Please share this open invitation with anybody you feel may be interested, staff, students and the wider public.

Sean, Paul, Peter, Alex, Tünde, Emma, Hassan, Dawn, Craig, Paul, Neil and Chrissi

The #FOS201 team

FOS201facilitators from